At present, Machine Type Communication (MTC) User Equipment (UE), also called Machine to Machine (M2M) user communication equipment, is a main application form of the current Internet of things.
In recent years, a Long-Term Evolution (LTE)/Long-Term Evolution Advance (LTE-Advance or LTE-A) system has a high spectral efficiency, therefore more and more mobile operating companies select LTE/LTE-A as an evolution direction of a broadband wireless communication system. Various types of LTE/LTE-A-based MTC data services will also become more attractive.
MTC equipment is usually low-cost equipment, and has characteristics of relatively narrow Radio Frequency (RF) bandwidth supported by itself, single receiving antenna and the like. RF sending and receiving bandwidth of the MTC equipment are usually 1.4 MHz, and the MTC equipment can only send or receive data of no more than 6 Physical Resource Blocks (PRBs). In a resource indication method of a related technology, a bitmap manner can only be adopted under a condition that a bandwidth is smaller than 10 Resource Blocks (RBs). A resource allocation “type 1” is a bitmap manner based on a Resource Block Group (RBG), and cannot indicate one or more RBs in any 6 continuous RBs. A resource allocation “type 2” is a continuous resource allocation manner, and cannot indicate multiple discontinuous RBs in any 6 continuous RBs. It can be seen that the resource indication method of the related technology cannot implement flexible scheduling of MTC UE. Moreover, due to a limit that RBs allocated to the MTC UE do not exceed 6 continuous RBs, a bit number indicating a resource allocation of the MTC UE theoretically may be smaller than a bit number required by the resource indication method directly adopting the related technology.